Back in 2010 Carlos Bueno wrote a blog post on The Full Stack Developer and since then there have been various posts that comment on it such as this post and this post which made the full stack developer seem an impossibility.
I’m not sure I buy into this idea of a Full Stack Developer as somebody who can for example throw together a web site using the latest framework/library, work at the TCP protocol level and understand i/o bottlenecks in a database system with any degree of mastery.
Whilst there are some extraordinary individuals out there that can manage this I doubt the majority of developers today can do so.
We as developers have, out of necessity, become specialists in specific areas of computing.
The rate of change, number of languages/tools/frameworks/libraries and depth of understanding required means that in general people simply don’t have the time to be able to keep up with all the changes to all the various areas of computing.